August 3, 2009 8:32 pm

Medical Privacy? to what extent?

We often receive those privacy statements from the Doctors offices around here. It is often interesting that they don’t give us the report on our own tests or diagnosis, specially at the labs. If asked, most often the answer is they will send it across to the referred doctor. However, I don’t understand why can’t they get the payments from the referred doctors? seriously, I go to the lab or a medical facility for further diagnosis. the Reports are obviously neither handed over to me nor mailed to my home address. However, a week later, I receive two kinds of letters from that office.

1. a feedback survey – i don’t know what kind of feedback they expect from us 2. a billing statement – saying you are responsible for the service offered to you on so and so date and time.

i had called up the lab once to mention the very same point, that I have not received my report but have received the billing statement. Now, they have the blaming game there – the response was, the standard – for the name sake apology – “I am sorry, but we are from billing department, you would have to call another number or call your doctor for report” – well i am still confused. Call the doctor’s office, Doctors are almost NEVER willing to talk to the patients over phone, either they are busy or probably their policy doesn’t allow.

so we would have to make another appointment to discuss about the reports. well, that’s of course, another consultation appointment and charged to patient’s account (or the insurance company)

Am I missing something?

on top of all these, I am still trying to understand from those service providers that, they are allowed to share patient’s PII (privacy information), diagnosis report, records with the Insurance company, with the referred doctor, any other doctor who requests for it, but not the patient or his immediate family members. I do not know what prevents them from providing the report to patient.